Kalmoni, NME;
Rae, IJ;
Murphy, KR;
Forsyth, C;
Watt, CEJ;
Owen, CJ;
(2017)
Statistical azimuthal structuring of the substorm onset arc: Implications for the onset mechanism.
Geophysical Research Letters
, 44
(5)
pp. 2078-2087.
10.1002/2016GL071826.
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Abstract
The onset of an auroral substorm is generally thought to occur on a quiet, homogeneous auroral arc. We present a statistical study of independently selected substorm onset arcs and find that over 90% of the arcs studied have resolvable characteristic spatial scales in the form of auroral beads. We find that the vast majority (~88%) of auroral beads have small amplitudes relative to the background, making them invisible without quantitative analysis. This confirms that auroral beads are highly likely to be ubiquitous to all onset arcs, rather than a special case phenomena as previously thought. Moreover, as these auroral beads grow exponentially through onset, we conclude that a magnetospheric plasma instability is fundamental to substorm onset itself.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Statistical azimuthal structuring of the substorm onset arc: Implications for the onset mechanism |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1002/2016GL071826 |
| Publisher version: | http://doi.org/10.1002/2016GL071826 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © 2017. The Authors. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences > Dept of Space and Climate Physics |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1546805 |
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